The invention relates generally to the field of photography, and in particular to photo collections. More specifically, the invention relates to a method of generating a photo album using reduced resolution sticker versions of a customer""s photographs.
Photographs, videos, and memorabilia collections are common means for maintaining a memory of events and people over a lifetime. These collections serve to augment the human memory and enrich the process of sharing the stories related to the artifacts. Collections of photos and memorabilia are considered one of the most important and valued possessions by most people. They are the first things that people think of when forced to flee their homes due to fire, flood or other natural disaster. These collections possess intrinsic, emotional value, even if they are never viewed, because the need to preserve a memory of life is strong and universal. When organized, viewed and shared on a regular basis a collection of memory artifacts generates a large reward, enriching the lives of all involved. The nature of these collections is that they grow steadily, event by event, year by year, and soon become large and difficult to manage. The most common means of organizing collections of photos, videos or memorabilia is to use an album or box. Common vinyl album pages provide the means to store and view between one and five standard sized photos per page. Creative people often spend hours carefully selecting and arranging photos, writing captions, clipping newspaper articles, and other memorabilia to create visual stories or scrapbooks. Once organized into groups or pages these photocollages greatly enhance a person""s ability to remember and share the story surrounding the depicted events. As used herein photocollage refers to a single page having a plurality of images, such as a page in a photo album, or a composite image having a number of images relating to a single theme such as a vacation, wedding, birthday party or the like. The concept of photocollage as used herein also includes the concept of a bound photo album having a plurality of pages, one or more of which is a photocollage. These simple organization tools allow the collections to be easily viewed and also serves to protect the artifacts themselves. There are numerous types of albums and boxes available in the market today, ranging from simple vinyl sleeves to boxes manufactured from specialized materials designed to preserve the artifacts. Album vendors include Pioneer Photo Albums, Design Vinyl and Cason-Talens. Box vendors include Exposures.
Despite the fact that many people are engaged in the collection of these memory artifacts few people invest the time necessary on a regular basis to organize and maintain them. Before long, the amount of unorganized material becomes a significant psychological barrier to getting organized. Other barriers exist which prevent people from actively maintaining these memorabilia collections such as confidence in their process, access to the materials, or remembering the details about the event. Often, once people get started on this organization task they find it rewarding and fun, but still a significant amount of work.
Many attempts have been made to provide tools for working with or organizing photo and memorabilia collections. Computer software programs such as Picture-It(trademark), by Microsoft, or Creative Photo Albums(trademark), by Dog Byte Development, allow people to work with digital versions of their photos and create digital versions of an album or print them on a home printer. Software products such as these require each photo or artifact exist in digital form before they can be used. Although these products increase the ability to change and enhance photos and scanned memorabilia they do not reduce the amount of work needed to organize collections or create visual stories. Other services such as Photo-Net(trademark) by PictureVision(trademark) will scan photographs in a high-quality format at the time of photo processing and provide a thumbnail image of the scanned images via the Internet. A customer, using these scanned images can create collections of photos which can be viewed on the Internet or have prints generated. Currently these services do not allow for the arrangement of several photos on a page and are limited to consumers who have a computer connected to the Internet and who are both computer and web literate.
It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that there remains a need within the art for a method by which consumers can create photocollages and photo albums in a manner that is as simple as ordering prints.
Other prior art disclosures have taught the use of thumbnail sketches that are reduced resolution versions of images requiring less storage space than the full resolution versions. The present invention addresses the foregoing discussed shortcomings in the prior art by creating a sticker sheet having a unique identifier so that a stored digital version of the image can be quickly accessed from a file. Accordingly, the present invention addresses the need for an improved method of generating photo albums from consumer photographs that requires a minimum amount of effort but yields a high-quality product and is reasonably priced.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above. Briefly summarized, according to one aspect of the present invention, a method of constructing a photo album includes the steps of providing a plurality of images; generating a sticker sheet of reduced resolution images from the full resolution digital images, the sticker sheet including a machine readable means for identifying the high resolution images to be included in the photo album represented by the reduced resolution stickers; selecting one or more of the reduced resolution images on the sticker sheet; placing the reduced resolution stickers onto a page layout sheet which indicates size of the image on the page, number of images per page, and textual additions, reading the selected reduced resolution images on the page layout sheet with a scanner; and constructing a photo album, or a photocollage from the digital images represented by the selected reduced resolution images and layout sheets.